Cat Person

(Susanna Fogel, USA, 2023)

What a comprehensively misguided project this is.

The basic idea – to adapt Kristen Roupenian’s widely-read 2017 short story – was, from a film industry perspective, inevitable, even smart. (The film’s poster exactly reproduces the original New Yorker photo-illustration: mouths too close, too late to back out.)

But how to expand it? In its original, compact form, it was a streamlined tale of modern dating manners (gone all awry) with a sharp punchline (unvanquished toxic masculinity), told from the psychological and emotional viewpoint of its narrator, university student Margot (well embodied in the movie by Emilia Jones).

Susanna Fogel (whose The Spy Who Dumped Me [2018] I liked) recognised the challenge – or the trap – in this adaptation: the Mr Toxic of the tale, Robert (Nicholas Braun, who will be forever playing awkward nerd-jerks with a misplaced sense of entitlement after Succession), can no longer be solely filtered through the narrator’s streamlined perceptions and memories.

He’s there on screen, he’s ‘real’, he has a presence; so he better have some psychology, and – horror of horrors – some balance in his depiction. Let’s see it from his side, too. Robert the insecure guy. Robert who knows no better. Robert will himself come to suffer. And so on, and on.

Indeed, Fogel and her collaborators made various remarks during the publicity rounds to the effect that their Cat Person is about the complexity of human relationships: how we can each be victim and villain, depending on whose story or viewpoint is being attended to at any given moment of the story.

The problem is: nobody reading Roupenian’s neat little anecdote would ever sum it up in a wishy-washy, facile-humanist, equal-opportunity bromide like that.

The trouble with Cat Person, however, begins well before that baggage roles out. From its first moment, the film comes on like a roughly quilted surface of cultural quotations – buzzwords, buzz-images, buzz-thoughts. And not in a good way!

It’s like being trapped in an AI-generated picture of the 21st century as woven solely from truncated exclamations on social media. Men are rapacious! Women are soft and sentimental, too ready to forgive! ‘Bro’ culture is misogynistic! Text messaging is deceptive!

Here's how the mosaic builds up. There’s an on-screen text about the difference between men and women, and the latter’s fear of the former’s tendency to violence. There’s the audio of 1950s sci-fi trailers (because Margot works at the candy counter of a repertory cinema): women as weak and defenseless, men as predatory monsters! There’s Isabella Rossellini, in the flesh, talking about the sex lives of insects (queen ants rule, male worker ants are disposable) – Margot’s assistant job in this character’s laboratory is the weirdest and least convincing adjunct to the initial storyline. In fact, nothing listed in this paragraph has much of a grip on narrative premise or motor. It’s all just The Way We Are Today – apparently.

Eventually, the budding relationship between Margot and Robert develops, and some kind of ordinary plotting takes over. For a little while, the expression of Margot’s habitual deference to men – her indulgence of their little foibles and suspect cultural tastes (like Star Wars movies) – strikes an OK comedy-of-manners note … even if Fogel and writer Michelle Ashford (Masters of Sex) are forced to invent the clumsy device of a best gal pal (Geraldine Viswanathan as Taylor) to air this material in dialogue format, with a few obligatory YA-fiction mannerisms (friendship at peril!) thrown in for bad measure. But, while Margot and Robert remain in the texting-only phase of mutual seduction, the film cruises along OK.

Once they are physically getting together, Margot begins freaking out, now and again – understandably, given the cultural miasma of paranoic gender suspicion woven all around her by the film. Every little gesture from Robert that could possibly seem creepy (he is 10 or so years older, after all!) triggers pastiche-visions of thriller-type clinches: locked doors, overpowering, rape.

I don’t know if the Tourneur/Lewton Cat People (1942) was a reference in Roupenian’s mind in 2017 – she’s borrowing, rather, the ‘cat/dog person’ lingo of modern banter – but it’s surely uppermost in Fogel’s. However, the flashes of horror that we get in this phase of the film register no more seriously than in a Will Ferrell comedy. This poses acute trouble for later moves that Cat Person wishes to make.

Eventually, there’s an uncomfortable, Bad Sex night – Robert watches too much porn, it seems – and the consequent arrival of the single word that delivers the punchline (literally it’s the final word) in Roupenian’s text (no spoiler from me for the innocent). Every savvy-reader primed for this film is waiting for the moment. It’s hard to pull off, because it’s the type of anecdote/weird joke which is hard to visualise, time and deliver well on screen. (Buñuel knew a thing or two about how to do it.) Telling detail: Fogel feels the need to stylise this gold-standard on-screen word into capitals! (While it’s normally, and more effectively, rendered in Roupenian.)

But in the movie version, this keyword is only the midway hinge. So much more expansion is yet to come!

Cats and dogs, as it turns out, are the chief ‘operators’ in the Fogel/Ashford dilation of Roupenian. Near the start, Margot tries to sneak a poor, depressed-looking dog into her dorm … and, later, she will glance around for those lovable cats in Robert’s pad, those assets that supposedly make him so cute when he discusses them in (ubiquitous) text messages. One animal points toward a possible ‘humanisation’ of Robert … while the other seals his damnation as a creep. This film wants to have it every way at once.

In its latter half, Cat Person strains to become a thriller, complete and entire. There’s threat, fear, violence, flames … and a wacky denouement with a vanished home-lot that threatens to turn into Carrie (1976); not to mention the empty ‘it could all happen again!’ coda which resets the film right back to the universal-male-toxicity premise it supposedly somewhat transcended in the meantime.

The genre move – mixing genres, switching tones, how daring, we’ve never seen such a thing! – is, in this case, an all-round disaster. Why? Quite simply because if you stuff the first-half of a film with jokey pastiches of that very genre, you cannot safely assume that the step-up to the ‘real thing’ will register as anything more than confusing. Indeed, I kept awaiting the ‘Margot wakes up from a dream’ shot (for the nth time), even when Cat Person was meant to be at its most deadly earnest and ‘realistic’.

The film is, in every sense, a washout.

© Adrian Martin 23 December 2023